The present invention relates to a device for recovering improperly counted out bank notes in an automatic cash dispenser or the like, and in particular to such a device which does not completely abort and restart the counting operation of bank notes unless necessary.
In an automatic cash dispenser, after it has been established how many bank notes should be counted out and delivered to a customer, these bank notes are separated one by one from a stack thereof and are counted out onto an accumulation pile in a bank note accumulation unit. Finally, after all the counting out is done, this accumulation pile is forwarded to the customer through a delivery slot or the like. It is inevitable that occasionally two or more of these bank notes stick together and are not properly separated, and are forwarded towards this accumulation pile in the counting process. In order to prevent delivery of this plurality of bank notes as one bank note, which would result in the disastrous delivery of too much money to the customer, the cash dispenser is typically provided with some means for detecting that such a superposed bank note packet has been mistakenly taken as one bank note, and this packet detection means may be provided at various points in the bank note counting path and may function in various ways.
It has been conventionally practiced to put the superposed bank note packet onto the accumulation pile of bank notes in any case, and, in the event that it is detected that such a multiple bank note packet has been mistakenly taken as one single bank note, then the entire accumulation pile of bank notes (the number of which cannot now be accurately relied upon) including this multiple bank note packet is recovered into a recovery unit, and the counting process is restarted from the beginning with an empty accumulation pile of bank notes. However, the efficiency of such a prior art bank note recovery system is very bad, because in the event of an error in bank note separation the bank note counting is started over again from scratch, and this can cause the waste of a great deal of time and repeated counting of money. Further, the amount of money that, on average, needs to be charged into the cash dispenser, in order to deliver a predetermined amount of money to a series of customers, becomes greater, since a relatively large amount of money is recovered into the recovery unit each time poor bank note separation occurs.
Accordingly, it might be conceived of to recover only the improperly separated multiple bank note packet, and not to disturb the accumulation pile of bank notes in the bank note accumulation unit. However, this simplistic concept is unworkable as such, because the length and the timing of picking up of such a superposed bank note packet are quite unpredictable--in the extreme case, such a superposed bank note packet could be many times longer in the direction of travel than a single bank note--and accordingly the problem arises that, when the distance between a properly separated and delivered single bank note and a following improperly separated multiple bank note packet becomes too small, a mechanism such as a flap mechanism which is used for switching the bank note or bank note packet between an acceptance path and a rejection and recovery path becomes incapable of responding properly to commands, so that even the bank note packet which is to be rejected from the counting process and recovered may not always be properly conducted to the bank note recovery unit.